Kimberley Strassel Author, The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech

Kimberley Strassel writes the weekly Potomac Watch column for The Wall Street Journal, where she is also a member of the editorial board. A graduate of Princeton University, her previous positions at the Journal include news assistant in Brussels, internet reporter in London, commercial real estate reporter in New York, assistant editorial features editor, columnist for OpinionJournal.com, and senior editorial page writer. In 2013 she served as a Pulliam Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Hillsdale College, and in 2014 she was a recipient of the Bradley Prize. She is the author of The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech.

The following is adapted from a speech delivered on April 26, 2017, at Hillsdale Colleges Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C., as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series.

I like to introduce the topic of free speech with an anecdote about my children. I have three kids, ages twelve, nine, and five. They are your average, normal kidswhich means they live to annoy the heck out of each other.

Last fall, sitting around the dinner table, the twelve-year-old was doing a particularly good job at this with his youngest sister. She finally grew so frustrated that she said, Oliver, you need to stop talkingforever. This inspired a volley of protests about free speech rights, and ended with them yelling shut up at each other. Desperate to stop the fighting and restore order, I asked each of them in turn to tell me what they thought free speech meant.

The twelve-year-old went first. A serious and academic child, he gave a textbook definition that included Congress shall make no law, an evocation of James Madison, a tutorial on the Bill of Rights, and warnings about certain exceptions for public safety and libel. I was happy to know the private-school fees were yielding something.

The nine-year-old went next. A rebel convinced that everyone ignores her, she said that she had no idea what public safety or libel were, but that it doesnt matter, because free speech means there should never be any restrictions on anything that anybody says, anytime or anywhere. She added that we could all start by listening more to what she says.

Then it was the five-year-olds turn. You could tell shed been thinking hard about her answer. She fixed both her brother and sister with a ferocious stare and said: Free speech is that you can say what you wantas long as I like it.

It was at this moment that I had one of those sudden insights as a parent. I realized that my oldest was a constitutional conservative, my middle child a libertarian, and my youngest a socialist with totalitarian tendencies.

With that introduction, my main point today is that weve experienced over the past eight years a profound shift in our political culture, a shift that has resulted in a significant portion of our body politic holding a five-year-olds view of free speech. What makes this shift notable is that unlike most changes in politics, you can trace it back to one day: January 21, 2010, the day the Supreme Court issued its Citizens United ruling and restored free speech rights to millions of Americans.

For nearly 100 years up to that point, both sides of the political aisle had used campaign finance lawsI call them speech lawsto muzzle their political opponents. The Right used them to push unions out of elections. The Left used them to push corporations out of elections. These speech laws kept building and building until we got the mack daddy of them allMcCain-Feingold. It was at this point the Supreme Court said, Enough. A five-judge majority ruled that Congress had gone way too far in violating the Constitutions free speech protections.

The Citizens United ruling was viewed as a blow for freedom by most on the Right, which had in recent years gotten some free speech religion, but as an unmitigated disaster by the Left. Over the decades, the Left had found it harder and harder to win policy arguments, and had come to rely more and more on these laws to muzzle political opponents. And here was the Supreme Court knocking back those laws, reopening the floodgates for non-profits and corporations to speak freely again in the public arena.

In the Lefts view, the ruling couldnt have come at a worse time. Remember the political environment in 2010. Democrats were experiencing an enormous backlash against the policies and agenda of the Obama administration. There were revolts over auto bailouts, stimulus spending, and Obamacare. The Tea Party movement was in full swing and vowing to use the midterm elections to effect dramatic change. Democrats feared an electoral tidal wave would sweep them out of Congress.

In the weeks following the Citizens United ruling, the Left settled on a new strategy. If it could no longer use speech laws against its opponents, it would do the next best thingit would threaten, harass, and intimidate its opponents out of participation. It would send a message: conservatives choosing to exercise their constitutional rights will pay a political and personal price.

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The Lefts War on Free Speech - Imprimis

EXECUTIVE ORDER

- - - - - - -

PROMOTING FREE SPEECH AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, in order to guide the executive branch in formulating and implementing policies with implications for the religious liberty of persons and organizations in America, and to further compliance with the Constitution and with applicable statutes and Presidential Directives, it is hereby ordered as follows:

Section 1. Policy. It shall be the policy of the executive branch to vigorously enforce Federal law's robust protections for religious freedom. The Founders envisioned a Nation in which religious voices and views were integral to a vibrant public square, and in which religious people and institutions were free to practice their faith without fear of discrimination or retaliation by the Federal Government. For that reason, the United States Constitution enshrines and protects the fundamental right to religious liberty as Americans' first freedom. Federal law protects the freedom of Americans and their organizations to exercise religion and participate fully in civic life without undue interference by the Federal Government. The executive branch will honor and enforce those protections.

Sec. 2. Respecting Religious and Political Speech. All executive departments and agencies (agencies) shall, to the greatest extent practicable and to the extent permitted by law, respect and protect the freedom of persons and organizations to engage in religious and political speech. In particular, the Secretary of the Treasury shall ensure, to the extent permitted by law, that the Department of the Treasury does not take any adverse action against any individual, house of worship, or other religious organization on the basis that such individual or organization speaks or has spoken about moral or political issues from a religious perspective, where speech of similar character has, consistent with law, not ordinarily been treated as participation or intervention in a political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) a candidate for public office by the Department of the Treasury. As used in this section, the term "adverse action" means the imposition of any tax or tax penalty; the delay or denial of tax-exempt status; the disallowance of tax deductions for contributions made to entities exempted from taxation under section 501(c)(3) of title 26, United States Code; or any other action that makes unavailable or denies any tax deduction, exemption, credit, or benefit.

Sec. 3. Conscience Protections with Respect to Preventive-Care Mandate. The Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of Labor, and the Secretary of Health and Human Services shall consider issuing amended regulations, consistent with applicable law, to address conscience-based objections to the preventive-care mandate promulgated under section 300gg-13(a)(4) of title 42, United States Code.

Sec. 4. Religious Liberty Guidance. In order to guide all agencies in complying with relevant Federal law, the Attorney General shall, as appropriate, issue guidance interpreting religious liberty protections in Federal law.

Sec. 5. Severability. If any provision of this order, or the application of any provision to any individual or circumstance, is held to be invalid, the remainder of this order and the application of its other provisions to any other individuals or circumstances shall not be affected thereby.

Sec. 6. General Provisions. (a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:

(i) the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or

(ii) the functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.

(b) This order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.

(c) This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.

DONALD J. TRUMP

THE WHITE HOUSE, May 4, 2017.

See the article here:

Presidential Executive Order Promoting Free Speech and ...

Craig F. Walker/globe staff

The Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library in Harvard Yard in Cambridge.

A nationwide debate has erupted over Harvard Universitys recent decision to rescind admission offers to at least 10 students because of extremely offensive memes they posted in a private Facebook chat.

Some higher education specialists call the punishment appropriate, but others say that Harvard ignored its own claim to embrace free speech and that it missed an opportunity to educate those students about their poor choices.

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I dont know what lesson these students have learned, other than to keep their mouth shut, said Will Creeley, a senior vice president at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, based in Philadelphia.

The incident comes at a time when free speech has become a flashpoint on college campuses across the country. Concern about acceptance and inclusivity has in some cases led administrators to curtail what might otherwise be seen as students freedom to act and speak how they choose.

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This is true at Harvard, where for the past year the school has been embroiled in a debate about whether the university can punish students for clubs they join off campus. Few on campus seem to support a group of off-campus, exclusive all-male social clubs, but many students, professors, and alumni nonetheless say the university went too far in trying to punish members by restricting their on-campus privileges.Administrators, meanwhile, say the clubs foster a judgmental and unsafe culture that Harvard does not condone.

For many young people, memes the wild variety of funny captions over memorable images are a second language.

The recent incident involving the Facebook memes took place in April, when administrators were sent copies of memes that students had posted in a private group chat on Facebook whose members had been admitted to the class of 2021.

The messages made sexual jokes about the Holocaust, implied that child abuse was sexually arousing, and poked fun at suicide and Mexicans.

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Harvard has declined to comment directly on the situation but did say the school reserves the right to withdraw admission for a variety of reasons, including if a student engages in behavior that brings into question their honesty, maturity, or moral character.

One of the students who lost her seat is the daughter of major donors to the university, according to correspondence reviewed by the Globe.

News of the rescinded applications comes less than two weeks after Harvard President Drew Faust used her commencement address to passionately defend free speech.

We must remember that limiting some speech opens the dangerous possibility that the speech that is ultimately censored may be our own, Faust said in the speech.

If some words are to be treated as equivalent to physical violence and silenced or even prosecuted, who is to decide which words? Freedom of expression, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said long ago, protects not only free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought we hate. We need to hear those hateful ideas so our society is fully equipped to oppose and defeat them, she said, according to an online copy of her remarks.

Creeley, of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, said the organization has seen a spike in the past decade of faculty and students disciplined for online speech that sometimes has nothing to do with their official capacities at the school. The Harvard case was unique because the students had not matriculated yet, he said.

In some instances, administrators overreact, Creeley said, citing a Yale lecturer who resigned in 2015 after she came under attack for challenging students to stand up for their right to wear Halloween costumes that could be construed as offensive.

I can help but think that no matter how offensive these jokes may be to most if not all, that theres been an opportunity missed in terms of the possibility of educating these students, Creeley said.

Wendy Kaminer, a lawyer, author, and former board member of the American Civil Liberties Union, said Harvard should not have rescinded admission since the students made no actual threats against people, she said.

I guess you could say there is no free speech at Harvard; there is only speech of which the administration does not disapprove, she said.

Others disagree. Jonathan P. Epstein, a senior vice president at the higher education consulting firm Whiteboard Higher Education in Waltham, works with college administrators daily and said he has heard little objection.

From what Ive heard, counselors have been telling students for years ... that anything that you do online is essentially part of your application, Epstein said.

Harvard did not tell students they cant make those jokes, he said, but simply that it does not want students who act that way to attend the school.

Howard Gardner, a professor in the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said this is not a question of free speech. Any community needs to observe certain standards, and admission to Harvard is a privilege, he said in an e-mail.

The students have learned a lesson that they will never forget, he said.

Continued here:

Harvard admission decision prompts debate over free speech - The Boston Globe

Florida Republican Rep. Francis Rooney, a member of the Education and the Workforce Committee, suggested Tuesday night that members may consider restricting funds from universities that limit free speech rights on campus.

I think there is a bill out there to not fund the University of California at Berkeley for what they did. And I think its certainly worth considering just like the idea of not funding sanctuary cities, Rooney said on Patriot Tonight on SiriusXMs Patriot channel.

Rooney went on to say, Its certainly worth considering cutting back funds federal funds to schools that dont believe enough in our Constitution and our free speech to defend it.

Following violence early in the yearthat broke out on the campus of UC Berkeley because of protests against libertarian provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, President Donald Trump tweeted, If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view NO FEDERAL FUNDS?

California Democrats lashed out at the president for his tweet. California Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee, whosedistrict includes Berkeleys campus, said in a statement:

Berkeley has a proud history of dissent and students were fully within their rights to protest peacefully. However, I am disappointed by the unacceptable acts of violence last night which were counterproductive and dangerous, she said. President Donald Trump cannot bully our university into silence. Simply put, President Trumps empty threat to cut funding from UC Berkeley is an abuse of power.

Rooney, however, believes such legislation would have support in the House.

I think there would be a lot of people that would want to do that and I think theres a couple of bills in place, he said.

Follow Kerry on Twitter

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Republican Rep Floats Cutting Funding From Schools That Limit Free Speech - The Daily Caller

Afirst amendment institute sent a letter to President Trump demanding he unblock all people hes blocked on Twitter or face legal action.

The Knight First Amendment Institute, which sent the letter, argues that the President, by blocking his critics, has violated the First Amendment rights of those people.

In a letter sent [yesterday] to President Trump, the Knight First Amendment Institute asked the President to unblock the Twitter accounts of individuals denied access to his account after they criticized or disagreed with him, or face legal action to protect the First Amendment rights of the blocked individuals, the Institutes press release read.

According to the Institute, Trumps Twitter account is a designated public forum and therefore subjected to the constitutionalfree speech guarantees that prohibits the government from silencing people in public places due to their views.

The Knight Institute asked the President to unblock its clients, or to direct his subordinates to do so, the release added.

Multiple people have recently taken to Twitter toannounce that they were blocked by the President on Twitter. A Jimmy Kimmel Live! comedy writer, Bess Kalb, wasblocked by Trump because, according to him, she hurt his feelings. (Most likely its due to her lame jokes.)

Some users have suggested the comedy writer contact the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and sue Trump for violating The Presidential Records Act whichguarantees the public have access to Trumps public records, in this case they mean his Twitter feed.

The Institute documented another case where a person was blocked by Trump. A Twitter user named @@AynRandPaulRyan was blocked after tweeting at Trump a gifof the Pope lookinggloomy.

Jameel Jaffer, the Knight Institutes executive director, claimed This is a context in which the Constitution precludes the President from making up his own rules.

Though the architects of the Constitution surely didnt contemplate presidential Twitter accounts, they understood that the President must not be allowed to banish views from public discourse simply because he finds them objectionable. Having opened this forum to all comers, the President cant exclude people from it merely because he dislikes what theyre saying.

Senior litigator at the Institute, Katie Fallow, meanwhile, said that When new communications platforms are developed, core First Amendment principles cannot be left behind.

The First Amendment disallows the President from blocking critics on Twitter just as it disallows mayors from ejecting critics from town halls.

Some First Amendmentexperts, however, werent sure theres a case to be made that the President must unblock the blocked users.Neil Richards, a professor at Washington Universitys law school, specializing in First Amendment theory, told WIREDthat The question of whether the Presidents Twitter feed is a public forum is a more complicated question.

The law here is famously muddled, because its trying to prevent the government from discriminating against people who speak on public streets and parks, but its trying to fight the urge to make everything a public forum.

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Free Speech Group Threatens to Sue Trump if he Doesn't Unblock Blocked Twitter Users - Heat Street

wbur

With guest host Anthony Brooks.

Harvard revokes acceptances from 10 students who shared offensive messages on Facebook. Are they curbing hate, or censoring free speech? A little of both?

Joan Vennochi, columnist at the Boston Globe. (@Joan_Vennochi)

Stuart Taylor, writer and co-author of "The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due Process at Americas Universities." (@staylor5448)

Harvard Crimson:Harvard Rescinds Acceptances for At Least Ten Students for Obscene Memes "In the group, students sent each other memes and other images mocking sexual assault, the Holocaust, and the deaths of children, according to screenshots of the chat obtained by The Crimson. Some of the messages joked that abusing children was sexually arousing, while others had punchlines directed at specific ethnic or racial groups. One called the hypothetical hanging of a Mexican child 'piata time.'"

Boston Globe:Harvard draws the line on free speech -- "Many will agree these students crossed a line and forfeited the right to engage in unfettered debate, at least at Harvard. But whats the next line of unacceptability? What if a private Facebook chat involved a screed against Elizabeth Warren, expressed support for a Muslim travel ban, or labeled as fascist Harvards effort to ban social clubs? Private schools write their own discipline codes. But with this action, Harvard is sending a message with a classic free-speech chill: You can say anything but not here."

WBUR:At Harvard, Memes Good And Bad Spark An Uproar "As a matter of university policy, the decision to revoke offers of admission is final. But this decision leaves behind questions of where to draw the line in a campus environment that students like Morris describe as sometimes stifling in its policing of speech."

This segment aired on June 6, 2017.

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Figuring Out Free Speech At Harvard - WBUR

The Knight First Amendment Institute, a digital rights group out of Columbia University,published an open letter to President Trump on Tuesday asking him to unblock his critics on Twitter or potentially face legal action for violating their constitutional rights.

In the four-page letter, the lawyers argue that Twitter operates as a designated public forum for First Amendment purposes, and accordingly the viewpoint-based blocking of our clients is constitutional.

Because being blocked by a person on Twitter means you cant see, search for, retweet or quote-tweet the other user, the Knight Institute argues that Trump is silencing American citizens based on their viewpoint and impeding upon their ability to critique the government when he blocks his critics, both rights protected by the First Amendment. From the Knight Institute:

Of course, it is easy to understand why you and your advisers might have found our clients posts to be disagreeable. Even if the posts were scornful and acerbic, however, they were protected by the First Amendment. As the Supreme Court has observed, [t]he sort of robust political debate encouraged by the First Amendment is bound to produce speech that is critical of those who hold public office, and public officials will on occasion be subject to vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks. The protection of speech critical of government officials is perhaps the core concern of the First Amendment, because the freedom of individuals to engage in this kind of speech is crucial to self-government.

This letter comes only days after a confusing back and forth from Trumps advisers on whether or not Trumps tweets represent the White House. During Tuesdays press briefing, Sean Spicer said that the presidents tweets are in fact official White House statements, even though Spicer himself spends considerable time at these briefings distancing the White House from Trumps messages on Twitter. Spicers confirmation comes just one day after Kellyanne Conway criticizedthe medias obsession with the presidents tweets.

But well let the man speak for himself:

Spicer and Trump are seemingly of one mind on how seriously to take Trumps Twitter tantrums. That may actually be bad news for Trumps political agenda, as the ACLU promised to use his recent string of tweets on the Muslim travel ban against him in future legal cases.

Trumps greatest Twitter meltdown, however, might be coming later this week: According to The Washington Posts Robert Costa, the president is expected to live-tweet ex-FBI director James Comeys testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday. At a March hearing, Comey was called to fact-check one of the presidents tweets in real time.

To most, a world without Trumps Twitter account probably sounds like a wonderful reprieve, but the Knight Institute is demanding the president or his subordinates take action to unblock users immediately.

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Free Speech Group Says Trump Violates the First Amendment by Blocking Critics on Twitter - Gizmodo

John Ingle , Times Record News 2:27 p.m. CT June 6, 2017

From left, San Francisco 49ers Eli Harold (58), quarterback Colin Kaepernick (7) and Eric Reid (35) kneel during the national anthem before their NFL game against the Dallas Cowboys on Sunday, Oct. 2, 2016 at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif.(Photo: Nhat V. Meyer, TNS)

The more I think about, the more I begin to believe there really is no such thing as free speech anymore.

(Cue the eye-rolling emoji. For the older generation that might not be as tech savvy; emojis are the equivalent of hand-drawn smiley faces back in the day, only these are digital types that express some sort of emotion.)

I hear people quite frequently even some who read this column say others have the right to their opinion, but not necessarily enough to make that opinion outwardly known. It's baffling at times. Some of is petty and insignificant, but some of it can be down right nasty.

Take the riots at the free-speech capitol of the country the University of California, Berkeley. Hundreds of disgruntled people took to the streets to protest speeches by two far right-wing personalities. I don't agree with what the two individuals have to say, for the most part, but they certainly have the right to do so. Right?

Some people who want to make a statement about business for one reason or another typically choose to do so by not purchasing their wares or shopping at their store. They don't force the business to shut down, they simply boycott it.

Then there is the Colin Kaepernick situation.

I defended Kaep when he decided that he would no longer stand for the national anthem, something that is well within his right. He was protesting to make a point, and he did. Right or wrong, he is protected by the First Amendment.

But there are consequences for that, too. It appears he is having difficulty finding a suitor willing to take on his reputation and employ his services, even as a back-up quarterback. Purely from a football perspective, Kaepernick's play, for one reason or another, certainly has fallen off after an incredible beginning to his young career. But, I don't think it has to the extent that all backups in the league are better than him.

So, you have to wonder: If it's not his play that is keeping him from the field, what is it? It has to be the stance he took and the attention it drew then and continues to draw now. His right to free speech is now costing him.

I also understand that football is a business, and they have internal rules for the betterment of the organization. Most businesses do. We have certain rules at the newspaper the prevents us from doing certain things, and we had them when I was active duty and civil service in the Air Force.

Nowadays, the only free speech that's really allowed is the free speech that is accepted by others. If the viewpoint is different, others will try to shut you down. The idea of true free speech is more like the mystical unicorn beautiful in theory but elusive.

As I close this out, I'm reminded that young men from allied countries stormed the beaches of Normandy 73 years ago on June 6, 1944. Fighting claimed more than 10,000, including more than 4,400 killed. They gave their lives for the ideologies of democracy and freedom, even a freedom that includes speech you don't necessarily agree with.

I think we can all agree that there is no place for hate speech or speech meant to incite the mob.

But, let's not lose sight of what the First Amendment was created to do.

Keep it real, Wichita Falls.

Business/metro editor John Ingle can be reached at john.ingle@timesrecordnews.com. You can also follow him on Twitter at @inglejohn1973.

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Free speech becoming more of a mystical unicorn - Times Record News

Hundreds of supporters of US President Donald Trump converged on Terry D. Schrunk Plaza for an event billed as a Trump Free Speech rally. They were slightly outnumbered by a mixed assemblage of counterprotesters across the street who viewed the free speech rally as an implicit endorsement of racism given its close timing to the racially charged stabbing.

(Photo: CNN)

The groups were separated by a wall of officers, heavily armed and wearing protective body armor, from local and federal police agencies.

Police dispersing crowd of anti-Alt Right demonstrators today in Portland. (Photo: CNN)

What began as a tense exchange of name-calling and profane insults took a turn when counterdemonstrators began throwing glass bottles, bricks and balloons of foul-smelling liquid at officers, Portland police said. Officers used pepper spray to push back the counterdemonstrators and closed the park where they had gathered, threatening to arrest anyone who remained.

Portland police did not indicate which side those arrested belonged to. CNN crews on the scene observed that most of the arrests were concentrated in the area of counterdemonstrators.

Three of the 14 arrested were given citations by federal officers and released, according to a statement from the Portland police department.

Of the other 11, most face charges of disorderly conduct, police said. Other charges against various protesters included carrying a concealed weapon, interfering with a peace officer and harassment, the police statement said.

Arraignments are scheduled for Friday in Multnomah County Court.

The rallies came in the wake of the stabbing deaths on May 26 of Ricky Best, 53, and Taliesin Namkai-Meche, 23, as they tried to defend two Muslim women from what police described as a barrage of hate speech.

Suspect Jeremy Joseph Christian raised the free speech issue in his arraignment last week.

Get out if you dont like free speech! he shouted as he entered the courtroom on Tuesday. You call it terrorism; I call it patriotism. Die.

Concerns raised early on

Tensions continued to build in Portland as the incident turned the city into the latest battleground over free speech and race relations in the Trump era.

We hope and pray that both sides try to keep in mind that in the big picture it might be easy to forget with all the emotions running high that we all have the same basic needs, Portland resident Margie Fletcher told CNN before Sundays rallies.

Her son, Micah, was wounded during the train attack as he and the others tried to intervene in what Portland police called hate speech toward a variety of ethnicities and religions directed at two women on the commuter rain.

Christian faces charges including two counts of aggravated murder, attempted murder, two counts of second-degree intimidation and being a felon in possession of a restricted weapon, police say.

Signs of animosity among the groups holding rallies began to emerge last week in online forums. The tensions put police on high alert and prompted the mayor to call on the federal government to revoke the event organized by a group called Patriot Prayer. Terry D. Schrunk Plaza is federal property where guns are barred.

Im a strong supporter of the First Amendment no matter what the views are that are being expressed, Mayor Ted Wheeler told HLN on Friday, but given the timing of this rally, I believed we had a case to make about the threats to public safety.

Federal officials declined the request, saying there was no legal basis to revoke the permit.

Protester: A vote for Trump not hate speech

Wheeler also called on protest organizer Joey Gibson to postpone the event. Gibson told CNN the event was planned before the stabbings and that Patriot Prayer had nothing to with Christian, the defendant. It was, he said, about taking a stand for President Trump and free speech in a liberal part of the country.

He said his group is not racist or alt-right and it should not be held responsible for the actions of counterdemonstrators, many of whom identified as anti-fascists.

Anti-facists have become a recurring presence at events testing the limits of free speech. They were blamed for riots that led to the cancellation of conservative firebrand Milo Yiannopoulos scheduled talk at The University of California, Berkeley, and have shown up at events featuring Ann Coulter.

They tend to equate such events with fascism and Nazis, messaging that was evident in signs declaring No more Nazis.

On each side Sunday, protesters carried signs reflecting a variety of causes. Counterdemonstrators chanted expletive-ridden slogans denouncing Trump. They carried signs proclaiming Supporters of Trump are traitors to America and Freedom ends where harm begins.

Across the street, Trump supporters waved Make America Great Again signs and wore the corresponding red hats.

In addition to the arrests, a large pickup truck flying two large American flags cruised past hundreds of anti-fascist protesters and honked its horn. Several people in the group ran up to the truck and ripped out the flags, bringing them into the crowd as others applauded. Others threw multiple large water bottles, sticks and other projectiles at the truck, which then sped away.

One Trump supporter said she was marching in support of free speech after the mayors attempt to silence the Patriot Prayer event. Another wearing a Police Lives Matter T-shirt said she wanted to reverse the lies surrounding Trump supporters.

Just because we voted for Trump doesnt equal hate speech, Debbie Sluder said.

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14 arrested as protesters clash at 'Free Speech' rally in Portland - FOX31 Denver

Photo of UCLA students at Israeli independence day that accompanied piece in New York Times on BDS. (Photo: Monica Almeida/New York Times)

Theres a lot of writing these days about the Left being oversensitive crybabies that cant handle free speech. Students shutting down racists like Milo Yiannopoulos and Charles Murray at the University of California Berkeley and Middlebury in Vermont made headlines in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, CNN, and Fox News.

At the same time, liberals are also quick to (rightly) point their fingers at the Trump administrations authoritarian tendencies from threatening journalists with meritless libel suits to banning them from White House press conferences.

But liberal institutions have hardly been open to those who challenge established orthodoxies. While universities often decry protests by their own students, theyve shown an uncanny openness to certain outside third parties influencing hiring decisions and classroom curricula.

Radhika Sainath

During all the Milo campus riot talk, who remembered UC Berkeleys suspension of a one-unit ethnic studies course on Palestine last semester? The student-instructor, twenty-two-year-old Paul Hadweh, had spent months preparing the course syllabus, going through all the right channels to get the course approved, only to find out from a friend watching Israel Channel 10 that his class was under scrutiny and Israeli government officials had covertly intervened. A few hours later he was informed by his faculty adviser that the course had been summarily suspended. Twenty-six students were left scampering to make up the unit weeks into the semester.

UC Berkeley chancellor Nicholas Dirks declared that the course, Palestine: A Settler Colonial Analysis, espoused a single political viewpoint and appeared to offer a forum for political organizing. His statement echoed the complaints of pro-Israel advocacy groups, forty-three of which had written to Dirks calling the course partisan and political indoctrination, and even raised McCarthyite alarms, accusing Paul of being an active member of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP).

A week later, after public outcry, the university reinstated the class.

What happened at Berkeley, though not unique, is particularly ironic given the schools iconic status as the birthplace of the free-speech movement. Californias flagship university prides itself on being a democratic institution, and thus allows students to propose, and teach, as Paul did, one-unit courses on subjects theyre interested in. Such Democratic Action at Cal (DeCal) courses include classes onPokmon,Harry Potter,The Hunger Games, andGame of Thrones as well as more serious topics such as Marxism and its Discontents, Helping the Navajo Rebuild, CopWatch, Film Making for Activists,and Human Trafficking Prevention. As one might imagine, the Marxism courserequires readings by Karl Marx, Lenin, and Gramsci all Marxists with no corresponding readings by Milton Friedman andFriedrich Hayek.Similarly, the Trafficking course contains no pro-trafficking viewpoints, and the Navajo Nation course objective is for students to not only learn about the issues surrounding the Navajo Nationbut actually do something about it!

Paulsreading list, in contrast, includedwritings by Palestinian and Israeli scholars such as Saree Makdisi, Ilan Pappe, the late Edward Said, and Eyal Weizman, as well as selections from the United NationssGoldstone Report (2009) and testimony from Israeli soldiers who fought in Gaza. The lecture scheduled for September 13 the day the class was suspended was on Anti-Semitism, Nationalism, Imperialism and Colonialism in the Late Nineteenthand Early TwentiethCentury.

Oddly, Chancellor Dirks is a colonial studies scholar whose seminal work includesThe Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain, which many a nineteenth-century Brit might have argued espouses a single political viewpoint and offers a forum for political organizing.His other work includesCastes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India, nothing if not putting Indias contemporary caste politics in historical perspective.

Paul and his adviser, UC Berkeley lecturer Hatem Bazian, were called into the office of Carla Hesse, the executive dean of the College of Letters and Sciences, the week after the summary suspension to discuss the course. Theywere questionedabout a poster used to advertise the class, and asked why it didnt say Israel on it. (It did.) They were alsoaskedwhether the course description and syllabus had a particular political agenda and what the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be. Dr Bazian explained that studying settler-colonialism doesnt constitute a political agenda and that Paul shouldnt need to have a solution in mind to contemplate an alternative to the status quo. Ultimately, the suspension was rescinded, without any changes to the course content. Paul was relieved as were his students, who had unanimously signed anopen letterdemanding the course be reinstated.

Sadly, the special scrutiny on Paul and his course was not unusual under Obama, and promises to be less unusual under Trump, as we saw at last weekslovefest between Trumps ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, and an anti-BDS conference organized by a number of the groups that called for the suspension of the Berkeley course and applauded arecent decisionby Fordham University to deny club status to a Students for Justice in Palestine group because the group would lead to polarization.

In spring 2015, the AMCHA Initiative, which organized the campaign against Pauls class, and applauded Fordhams decision, similarlycalledfor the elimination of a student-led UC Riverside literature course on Palestinian Voices. The university was forced to launch an investigation and ultimately determined that the class was fully protected under the UCs course content and academic freedom policies. Though the course went forward, the student instructor was subjected to weeks of Islamophobic and misogynist cyberbullying.

The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), also a signatory to the letter against Pauls class, has likewise complained about courses it disagrees with. In spring 2015, itthreatenedColumbia University with legal action if it allowed a teachers workshop by law professorKatherine Franketitled Citizenship and Nationality in Israel/Palestine to go forward, declaring that it was one-sided, riddled with anti-Israel bias and inaccurate . . . since there is presently no country called Palestine. The letter also accused Professor Franke of antisemitism for her public support of using boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) to pressure Israel into complying with international law. The workshop proceeded as planned.

The ZOAs record goes on. In 2011, the organizationfileda Title VI complaint with the Department of Educations (DOE) Office for Civil Rights arguing that a Rutgers University event featuring a Holocaust survivor and a Nakba survivor created a hostile environment for Jewish students, andwroteto Northeastern University in 2013 complaining of one-sided course readings hostile to Israel. Its fourteen-page letter to the City University of New York (CUNY) last February urging the banning of SJP chapters for alleged antisemitic actions sparked a six-month independent investigation by a former federal judge and prosecutor. All of these attacks failed. The DOEthrew outthe Title VI complaint, and the CUNY investigationfoundthat SJP was not responsible for any antisemitic incident, and that the tendency to blame SJP ... is a mistake.

Again, these attempts at censorship garnered little of the attention we see when a few college students protest, interrupt, or shut down talks by neo-Nazis and racists.

The First Amendment protects the right to free expression from government interference, whether that expression be Marxist or anti-Zionist.Cases like Pauls are precisely why the Supreme Court warned against anticommunist loyalty oaths in its 1967 decisionKeyishian v. Board of Regents of University of New York.In that case, professors at the State University of New York sued after they were notified that if they failed to sign a certificate swearing that they were not communist, they would be dismissed. In holding that the oath was unconstitutional, the Supreme Court noted:

The essentiality of freedom in the community of American universities is almost self-evident . . . To impose any straitjacket upon the intellectual leaders in our colleges and universities would imperil the future of our Nation. No field of education is so thoroughly comprehended by man that new discoveries cannot yet be made. Particularly is that true in the social sciences, where few, if any, principles are accepted as absolutes. Scholarship cannot flourish in an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust. Teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding; otherwise our civilization will stagnate and die.

When close family members saw the news about Pauls course, they told him he was putting the family in danger. He received a barrage of media inquiries asking whether he was attempting to indoctrinate his peers with antisemitic thinking. The story was covered in Russian, Turkish, Emirati, Israeli, Palestinian, Latin American, and American outlets. He couldnt sleep. He became physically ill and was overwhelmed by anxiety as he worried for his familys safety while he balanced his coursework, fought to reinstate his course, and worked to clear his name.

Its particularly disconcerting that Berkeley informed powerful Israel advocacy groups that Pauls class had been suspended, ostensibly for failing to follow proper procedures, before contacting Paul or anyone in the layers of faculty oversight that had approved the course in the first place.

Such censorship attempts have the potential to cause a tremendous chilling effect on campus debate on Israel/Palestine and alienate Palestinian students and Muslim students in an increased climate of fear.

Students and citizenry should of course feel free to debate scholarship, analyze research, and question underlying theories taught in college classes. But when powerful groups call for scrutiny of classroom discussion that appears to challenge the status quo, colleges should tread carefully.

Theres a lot oftalkthese days on how student-led calls for trigger warnings and against microaggressions may be affecting classroom discussion. A recentarticledescribed a Syracuse University professors decision to disinvite a filmmaker because she (wrongly) speculated the film would be protested by the BDS faction as the chilling effect of political correctness.

But idiosyncratic decisions made by individuals are not comparable to systematic decisions made by powerful institutional actors pressured by states and donors. In looking at issues of free speech and academic freedom, its important to note the difference between individuals responding to the free speech of other members of the academic community, and the free speech of the academic community responding to pressures from big donors and the state.

Its critical for us all to make that distinction clear, and recognize that the actions of institutional actors have much broader implications than the actions of individual students or professors inside the university. And its time that universities recognize that in order to pursue their function as spaces for free intellectual inquiry, they cant succumb to the political pressures of multi-million-dollar suppression industries.

This post was originally published here on April 6, 2017, by Jacobin.

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The real free speech threat - Mondoweiss

Free speech is important. It guards against governments dangerous tendency to repress certain kinds of communication, including protest, journalism, whistleblowing, academic research, and critical work in the arts. On the other hand, think of a doctor dispensing bogus medical advice, or someone making a contract that she plans to breach, or a defendant lying under oath in court. These all involve written or spoken statements, but they dont seem to fall within the domain of free speech. They are what the legal theorist Frederick Schauer at the University of Virginia calls patently uncovered speech: communication that warrants no special protection against government regulation.

However, once we extrapolate beyond the clear-cut cases, the question of what counts as free speech gets rather tricky. A business whose website gets buried in pages of search results might argue that Googles algorithm is anti-competitivethat it impedes fair competition between sellers in a marketplace. But Google has dodged liability by likening itself to a newspaper, and arguing that free speech protects it from having to modify its results. Is this a case of free speech doing its proper work, or an instance of free speech running amok, serving as cover for a libertarian agenda that unduly empowers major corporations?

To answer this question, we need a principled account of the types of communication covered by free speech. But attempts to provide such an account havent really succeeded. We can pick out cases on either side of the divideProtections for journalism and protest? Yes! For perjury and contracts? No!but there arent any obvious or natural criteria that separate bona fide speech from mere verbal conduct. On the contrary, as theorists have told us since the mid-20th century, all verbal communication should be understood as both speech and conduct.

Some authors see these definitional difficulties as a fatal problem for the very idea of free speech. In Theres No Such Thing as Free Speech: And Its a Good Thing Too (1994), the American literary critic and legal scholar Stanley Fish argued that free speech is really just a rhetorically expedient label that people assign to their favored forms of communication. Theres a grain of truth in this; but it doesnt change the fact that governments still have a tendency to repress things such as protest and whistleblowing, and that we have good reasons to impose institutional safeguards against such repression if possible.

Instead of throwing out free speech entirely, a better response might be to keep the safeguards but make their sphere of application very broad. This is roughly what happens in Canadian law, where nearly any type of conduct can fall within the constitutional ideal of free expression, provided that it is trying to convey some kind of meaning. The downside is that if nearly anything can qualify as expressive in the relevant sense, then we cannot categorically privilege expression itself as an inviolable norm. All we can ask lawmakers to do is factor in the interests that such expression serves, and try to strike a balance with all the other competing interests (such as equality, for example, or national security). While such trade-offs are standard in Commonwealth legal systems, they have the unwelcome effect of making it easier for governments to justify their repressive tendencies.

Id propose a third way: put free speech as such to one side, and replace it with a series of more narrowly targeted expressive liberties. Rather than locating actions such as protest and whistleblowing under the umbrella of free speech, we could formulate specially-tailored norms, such as a principle of free public protest, or a principle of protected whistleblowing. The idea would be to explicitly nominate the particular species of communication that we want to defend, instead of just pointing to the overarching genus of free speech. This way the battle wouldnt be fought out over the boundaries of what qualifies as speech, but instead, more directly, over the kinds of communicative activities we think need special protection.

Take the idea of public protest. Standard free-speech theory, concerned as it is with what counts as speech, tends to draw a line between interference based on the content of the speech, such as the speakers viewpoint (generally not allowed), and interference that merely affects the time, place, and manner in which the speech takes place (generally allowed). But this distinction runs into trouble when it comes to protest. Clearly governments should be blocked from shutting down demonstrations whose messages they oppose. But equally they shouldnt be able to multiply the rules about the time, place, and manner in which demonstrations must take place, such that protests become prohibitively difficult to organize. One reason to have a dedicated principle of free public protest, then, is to help us properly capture and encode these concerns. Instead of seeing demonstrations as merely one application of a generic free-speech principle, we can use a narrower notion of expressive liberty to focus our attention on the distinctive hazards faced by different types of socially important communication.

If this all seems a bit optimistic, its worth noting that we already approach some types of communication in this waysuch as academic freedom. Universities frequently come under pressure from political or commercial lobby groupssuch as big oil, or the Israel lobbyto defund research that runs counter to their interests. This kind of threat has a distinctive underlying causal mechanism. In light of this problem, universities safeguard academic freedom via laws and regulations, including guidelines that specify the grounds for which academics can be fired or denied promotion. These moves are not just a specific implementation of a general free-speech principle. Theyre grounded in notions of academic freedom that are narrower than and distinct from freedom of speech. My suggestion is that all our expressive liberties could be handled in this way.

The subdivision of expressive liberties isnt going to magically fix all the genuinely controversial issues around free speech, such as what to do about search engines. However, we dont need to resolve these debates in order to see, with clarity and confidence, that protest, journalism, whistleblowing, academic research, and the arts need special protection. The parceled-out view of expressive liberties captures the importance of these activities, while sidestepping the definitional problems that plague standard free-speech theory. These are not merely theoretical advantages. Any time a country is creating or revising a bill of rights, the question of how to protect communicative practices must be considered afresh. Multiple expressive liberties is an approach worth taking seriously.

This piece originally appeared at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons. Learn how to write for Quartz Ideas. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

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Free speech is too broad a categorylet's break it up in order to save it - Quartz

From preventing invited speakers from being heard, as at UC Berkeley, to instructors inflammatory and intimidating political rants, as at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, obstacles to free speech on college campuses seem to be an epidemic.

The latest example comes from Los Angeles Pierce College in Woodland Hills, where student Kevin Shaw, president of his schools Young Americans for Liberty chapter, was confronted by the dean of students in November when he tried to pass out Spanish-language copies of the U.S. Constitution on the campus main walkway. Shaw was told he must apply for a free speech permit and remain in a minuscule free speech zone which comprises about 616 square feet of the 426-acre campus, or else he would be removed from campus.

Shaw noted that the schools administration apparently did not have any qualms about an anti-President Trump protest that took place around the same time, in which students shouted through bullhorns and flooded the same walkway where he had attempted to distribute copies of one of our nations founding documents.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is now representing Shaw in a lawsuit challenging the free speech zone policies of Pierce College and the Los Angeles Community College District. It is the first lawsuit in the organizations new Million Voices Campaign, which seeks to strike down unconstitutional speech codes across the country.

When I attempted to hand out copies of the Constitution that day, my only intention was to get students thinking about our founding principles and to inspire discussion of liberty and free speech, Shaw said in a statement from FIRE. I had no idea I would be called upon to defend those very ideals against Pierces unconstitutional campus policies. This fight is about a students right to engage in free thinking and debate while attending college in America.

We hope they are successful. As the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in its 1972 Healy v. James decision, state colleges and universities are not enclaves immune from the sweep of the First Amendment. Particularly on a public campus, the free exchange of ideas and critical thinking should be celebrated, not stifled and shoved away into a tiny corner.

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At Pierce and other colleges, 'free speech' zones must go - LA Daily News

A A

Jay Ambrose

Charles Murray, someone who makes his living by thinking and appreciates its grandeur as a guiding force, recently had a firsthand encounter with a mob of college students insisting instead that fury should rule the day.

I am tempted to generalize about a sickeningly spoiled, intellectually betrayed younger generation out to announce its moral superiority by way of moral thuggery. That goes too far. Were talking about 100 people. But they symbolized more than themselves. Something significant is indeed going on. And it is pathetic.

The setting for this story is Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vt. Murray, a libertarian author and scholar at the American Enterprise Institute think tank, had been invited to speak at the school by libertarian students, and no wonder.

A few years back, he had written an amazing book that as much as predicted what we witnessed in the 2016 presidential election. It was called Coming Apart and was about an upper-middle class more and more separated from a white working class letting go of self-reliance, industriousness, marriage and religion. A nation once unified in its norms was no more and the result was gated communities over here and increased poverty, crime and family dissolution over there.

You could read the book and not be persuaded by every sentence while nevertheless feeling that, yes, it is crucial to restore the exceptionalism of earlier days. Worry about all of this grew in 2016 when we witnessed so much talk about the establishment masses growling at the elites who in turn looked down on the deplorables. Donald Trump then made vulgarity his calling card as he rose mightily against political correctness.

It was legitimate to do so. Political correctness can be incorrect to the point of pulling a professors hair, hurting her neck, making her fear for her life and sending her to a hospital. This was what happened to a woman who was on the scene to debate Murray after his talk. To its credit, the administration did its best to maintain peace and sanity, and the professor was there to assure another side got told. But the protesters were not about to permit something as civilized as an exchange of views.

So the students unleashed obscenities in chants and signs, pushed, threatened, banged on a car, roughed up the professor and left one thinking of what else we have seen lately: the violence, speech oppression and vandalism at Berkeley, still other frenetic, mindless protests, silly university speech codes, safe zones, microaggressions, trigger warnings and no-sombrero rules.

Look around and its clear mean-spirited, self-absorbed, holier-than-God attitudes are definitively with us. They did not arise out of nothing but out of modes of askew child rearing, cultural degeneration and too many postmodernist, leftist professors preaching what should never be practiced. To what extent could our future be shaped by those caught up in such a self-satisfied la la land of absurdist rationalizations and desires for collectivist control?

It is hard to say, but I am not just indulging ad hominem displeasure here. The main thing is the assault on free speech. Without it, there is no democracy. Truth becomes harder and harder to find. We do not grow. We do not learn. Without free speech, life shrinks, goodness shrinks, meaningfulness shrinks.

A few incidents do not give us the end of the American creed but they do point to ways in which it is being subverted. An incident in which a powerful, creative thinker is shut up is all the more frightening because it tells us how much we would be hurt if the villains of this tale were to grow as much as they would like in their power and influence.

Jay Ambrose is an op-ed columnist for McClatchy-Tribune. Readers may send him email at speaktojay@aol.com.

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Ambrose: Stick up for free speech, America - The Columbian

Editor, The Transcript:

I see where our Christian Right junior U.S. senator is complaining that churches cant engage in political activity. Well, they can, of course, if theyre willing to forfeit their tax-exempt status. Thats part of the time-honored separation of church and state.

Lankford, R-Okla., even labels his position as the Free Speech Fairness Act. But long-standing federal law, the Johnson Act of 1954, prohibits nonprofits and religious organizations from politicking.

Pandering to religious voters, President Trump supports the idea of removing this prohibition, but allowing churches and other nonprofits to enter the political arena would, in effect, provide a taxpayer subsidy to all sorts of controversial organizations.

I suspect most us would not want a devil-worshiping group to spend tax-free money to proselytize its views. Or, to follow Trumps position, allowing certain unpopular religious groups (e.g., Muslims) to promote their views with tax-exempt funds. The separation of church and state has served this nation well over our history. As the old saying goes, Dont fix it if it aint broke. So, back off, Senator. Youre messing with a vital part of our constitutional heritage.

DAVID MORGAN

Norman

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LETTER TO THE EDITOR: Free Speech Fairness Act doesn't fix anything - Norman Transcript

Dame Jenni Murray, who is scarcely a hyena of the fascist Right, has received an impartiality warning from the BBC for expressing her legitimate opinion that a man whose sex is changed to a woman isnt really a woman at all.

It is abominable that the BBC should reprimand her for this. Dame Jenni has been a woman all her life; she knows very well what being a woman is; in a free country, she is entitled to voice her view. It is up to the rest of us whether we agree with her. As our public service broadcaster, the BBCs duty is to encourage discussion on such subjects, not close it down.

We already live in a society in which devout Christians are regarded as engaging in hate speech if they voice their scepticism about applying the institution of marriage to same-sex couples; where anyone who denies man-made climate change is regarded as mentally defective; and, of course, where one is branded...

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Free speech is under threat: After gagging Jenni Murray, will the ... - Telegraph.co.uk

Bill would chill free speech on college campuses The State As an educator and a Jew, I am troubled by the support in our Legislature for H.3643, which purports to protect Jewish students and faculty but in practice would harm free speech at educational institutions, where robust political debate on important ...

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Bill would chill free speech on college campuses - The State

Mean-spirited, self-absorbed, holier-than-God attitudes are definitively with us. They did not arise out of nothing but out of modes of askew child rearing, cultural degeneration and too many postmodernist, leftist professors preaching what should never be practiced.

Charles Murray, someone who makes his living by thinking and appreciates its grandeur as a guiding force, recently had a firsthand encounter with a mob of college students insisting instead that fury should rule the day.

I am tempted to generalize about a sickeningly spoiled, intellectually betrayed younger generation out to announce its moral superiority by way of moral thuggery. That goes too far. Were talking about 100 people. But they symbolized more than themselves. Something significant is indeed going on. And it is pathetic.

The setting for this story is Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont. Murray, a libertarian author and scholar at the American Enterprise Institute think tank, had been invited to speak at the school by libertarian students, and no wonder.

A few years back, he had written an amazing book that as much as predicted what we witnessed in the 2016 presidential election. It was called Coming Apart and was about an upper-middle class more and more separated from a white working class letting go of self-reliance, industriousness, marriage and religion. A nation once unified in its norms was no more, and the result was gated communities over here and increased poverty, crime and family dissolution over there.

You could read the book and not be persuaded by every sentence while nevertheless feeling that, yes, it is crucial to restore the exceptionalism of earlier days. Worry about all of this grew in 2016 when we witnessed so much talk about the establishment masses growling at the elites who in turn looked down on the deplorables. Donald Trump then made vulgarity his calling card as he rose mightily against political correctness.

It was legitimate to do so. Political correctness can be incorrect to the point of pulling a professors hair, hurting her neck, making her fear for her life and sending her to a hospital. This was what happened to a woman who was on the scene to debate Murray after his talk. To its credit, the administration did its best to maintain peace and sanity, and the professor was there to assure another side got told. But the protesters were not about to permit something as civilized as an exchange of views.

So the students unleashed obscenities in chants and signs, pushed, threatened, banged on a car, roughed up the professor and left one thinking of what else we have seen lately: the violence, speech oppression and vandalism at Berkeley, still other frenetic, mindless protests, silly university speech codes, safe zones, microaggressions, trigger warnings and no-sombrero rules.

Look around and its clear mean-spirited, self-absorbed, holier-than-God attitudes are definitively with us. They did not arise out of nothing but out of modes of askew child rearing, cultural degeneration and too many postmodernist, leftist professors preaching what should never be practiced. To what extent could our future be shaped by those caught up in such a self-satisfied la la land of absurdist rationalizations and desires for collectivist control?

It is hard to say, but I am not just indulging ad hominem displeasure here. The main thing is the assault on free speech. Without it, there is no democracy. Truth becomes harder and harder to find. We do not grow. We do not learn. Without free speech, life shrinks, goodness shrinks, meaningfulness shrinks.

A few incidents do not give us the end of the American creed but they do point to ways in which it is being subverted. An incident in which a powerful, creative thinker is shut up is all the more frightening because it tells us how much we would be hurt if the villains of this tale were to grow as much as they would like in their power and influence.

Whats needed is much ado about something very scary.

View original post here:

Don't like a point of view? Free speech protects it, anyhow - The Seattle Times

Not sure my next book will be Free Speech Is Not Enough, but Im thinking about it. Can the world really be ready for a Not Enough series? Or should this idea be Left Behind? (Classical reference there. . .)

Conservatives are making a big strategic mistake to repair behind the principle of free speech in response to the kind of suppression of speech weve seen like Charles Murray at Middlebury, Milo at Berkeley, etc. Put simply, todays ill-liberal left doesnt believe in free speech any more. To the contrary, they are openly contemptuous of the idea of free speech, and have an entire theory to justify suppressing speech in the name of justice.

But lets start with the superficial defects of the free speech redoubt. The left says America, and any defender of America, is racist, sexist, imperialistic, homophobic, transphobic, glutenphobic, and probably phobicphobic before long. To respond primarily with an appeal to free speech to is concede the premise of the left. Are we really sayingYes, I demand my right to free speech to defend racism, sexism, etc. . .? Lame.

The right response to demands for censorship of speech is to challenge the leftist narrative, and its underlying theory, directly. The left believes that the idea of free speech itself is a tool of oppression, which is why the left has no respect for the idea of free inquiry. This is not new at all; it is merely a revival of Herbert Marcuses doctrines from the 1960s. As Marcuse wrote back then, [T]he restoration of freedom of thought may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on teachings and practices in the educational institutions. . . .

One person who gets this clearly is Stephen Carter of Yale Law School. He has a very good column up at Bloomberg News this week on The Ideology Behind Intolerant College Students. Worth reading the whole thing, but heres the best part:

I want to say a word about the ideology of downshouting. Students who try to shut down debate are not junior Nazis or proto-Stalins. If they were, I would be content to say that their antics will wind up on the proverbial ash heap of history. Alas, the downshouters represent something more insidious. They are, I am sorry to say, Marcusians. A half-century-old contagion has returned.

The German-born Herbert Marcuse was a brilliant and controversial philosopher whose writing became almost a sacred text for new-left intellectuals of the 1960s and 1970s. Nowadays, his best-known work is the essay Repressive Tolerance. There he sets out the argument that the downshouters are putting into practice.

For Marcuse, the fact that liberal democracies made tolerance an absolute virtue posed a problem. If society includes two groups, one powerful and one weak, then tolerating the ideas of both will mean that the voice and influence of the strong will always be greater. To treat the arguments of both sides with equal respect mainly serves the protection and preservation of a repressive society. That is why, for Marcuse, tolerance is antithetical to genuine democracy and thus repressive.

He proposes that we practice what he calls a liberating or discriminating tolerance. He is quite clear about what he means: tolerance against movements from the Right, and tolerance of movements from the Left. Otherwise the majority, even if deluded by false consciousness, will always beat back efforts at necessary change. The only way to build a subversive majority, he writes, is to refuse to give ear to those on the wrong side. The wrong is specified only in part, but Marcuse has in mind particularly capitalism and inequality.

Opening the minds of the majority by pressing one message and burdening another may require apparently undemocratic means. But the forces of power are so entrenched that to do otherwise to tolerate the intolerable is to leave authority in the hands of those who will deny equality to the workers and to minorities. That is why tolerance, unless it discriminates, will always be repressive.

Marcuse is quite clear that the academy must also swallow the tough medicine he prescribes: Here, too, in the education of those who are not yet maturely integrated, in the mind of the young, the ground for liberating tolerance is still to be created.

Todays campus downshouters, whether they have read Marcuse or not, have plainly undertaken his project. Probably they believe that their protests will genuinely hasten a better world.They are mistaken.Their theory possesses the same weakness as his. They presume to know the truth, to know it with such certainty that they are comfortable indeed enthusiastic at the notion of shutting down debate on the propositions they hold dear.

A nice piece of work by Prof. Carter.

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Free Speech Is Not Enough - Power Line (blog)

Photo: Lisa Rathke /Associated Press

Middlebury College students turn their backs to author Charles Murray during his lecture March 2 in Middlebury, Vt. Later, the protest took on a more ominous tone.

Middlebury College students turn their backs to author Charles Murray during his lecture March 2 in Middlebury, Vt. Later, the protest took on a more ominous tone.

The start of something? An assault on free speech at Middlebury

At Middlebury College this month, Charles Murray needed a safe space literally.

In a significant escalation of the campus speech wars, protesters hooted down the conservative scholar in a lecture hall and then roughed up a Middlebury faculty member escorting him to a car.

The Middlebury administration commendably tried to do the right thing and stand by Murrays right to be heard but was overwhelmed by a yowling mob with all the manners and intellectual openness of a gang of British soccer hooligans.

If campus protests of speech begin to more routinely slide into violence, Middlebury will be remembered as a watershed.

First, there was the target. Charles Murray is controversial mainly for his book The Bell Curve, about IQ but he is one of the most significant social scientists of our age. He is employed by the prestigious conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute, and his books are highly influential and widely reviewed. His latest, which was to be the topic of his Middlebury talk, is Coming Apart, a best-selling account of the struggles of the white working class that illuminated some of the social forces behind the rise of Donald Trump.

No one is bound to accept any of Murrays ideas, but they are inarguably worth engaging. He exists in a different universe from Milo Yiannopoulos, the alt-right provocateur infamous for saying or doing anything to get infamous. That Middlebury protesters cant tell the difference between the two shows that their endeavor to know or understand nothing outside their comfort zone has been a smashing success.

Second, there was the venue. No one has ever mistaken Middlebury, a small Vermont liberal arts college founded by Congregationalists, for Berkeley. It doesnt have a reputation as a hotbed and training ground for rabble-rousers, and yet it has given us one of the most appalling episodes of anti-speech thuggery in recent memory. If it can happen at Middlebury, it can happen anywhere.

Finally, there was the violence. The students who brought in Murray framed the evening as an invitation to argue and asked professor Allison Stanger, a Democrat in good standing, to serve as Murrays interlocutor. When chanting students commandeered the lecture hall, Stanger and Murray repaired to another room for a live-streamed discussion. Protesters found the room, pounded on the windows and pulled fire alarms. When Murray and Stanger exited at the end of the live-stream and headed for their getaway car, protesters shoved and grabbed Stanger, who later went to the hospital, and pounded on the car and tried to obstruct it.

Stanger wrote afterward that she feared for my life. And for what offense? Talking to someone who thinks differently from the average Middlebury faculty member or student.

Political correctness has been a phenomenon on campuses since the 1980s but now has become much more feral. The root of the phenomenon is the idea that unwelcome speech is tantamount to a physical threat against offended listeners. Shutting down a speaker and literally running him off campus is, from this warped perspective, an entirely justifiable action.

Of course, speech doesnt threaten anyone. The appropriate response to an erroneous argument is counterargument. And the free exchange of ideas always allows for the possibility that someone will actually learn something.

If campuses arent to sink further into the miasma of illiberalism, administrators will have to actively fight the tide of suppression. Its not enough to say the right things about free speech; they have to punish thuggish student agitators. Otherwise, college campuses may become increasingly unsafe spaces for anyone departing from a coercive orthodoxy.

comments.lowry@nationalreview.com

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The start of something? An assault on free speech at Middlebury - mySanAntonio.com

By Dennis BaxleySpecial to the Star-Banner

The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution clearly states that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech. This freedom from the establishment of a state religion and the protection of free speech establishes the protection of religious speech and expression as well. There have been many challenges by the ACLU and others at public schools across America and in Florida to sterilize the schools of religious expressions using the establishment clause; however, this clause was intended to declare religious freedom in the U.S. and to escape the establishment of state religion as was common in governments of the Old World.

After much case law, it is time to articulate in statute how Florida school policy will apply this free speech to our school administrators, teachers, staff and students. We owe them clarity.

This proposed bill, SB 436, Religious Expression in Public Schools, is not in response to a crisis or a high-profile case. The time to clarify is not in the middle of a crisis, but the trend is clear to people of faith. Expressions of faith have been stifled in our public schools. This proposal is not intended as a criticism of our school administration; we have left them without clarity on this issue. Free speech does not stop at the school property line, and this statute will give clarity and direction on how to preserve this constitutional right without authorizing disruption and disharmony.

Rep. Kimberly Daniels, a Democrat African-American House member from Jacksonville, brought this language to me, a Republican Caucasian senator. It is a bipartisan and bicameral proposal brought in harmony to the legislative body. It is much like an enabling bill often done to apply a constitutional amendment when added to the Florida Constitution by the voters.

How refreshing to work across the aisle and across the chambers to clarify how the free speech of our citizens will be protected at our schools.

Without this free religious expression, we are in fact establishing a state-sponsored religion secular humanism.

Let Freedom Ring!

State Sen. Dennis Baxley serves District 12 in the Florida Senate, which includes the southern third of Marion County.

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Dennis Baxley: Protecting free speech in schools - Ocala